Exclusive: Bill Daley, unplugged

“On the foreign policy-military side, you can act pretty quickly,” Daley says. “That is why the president, based upon frustration, is doing this ‘we can’t wait.’ He is going to every agency, every department, and saying, ‘What can you do on your own? What can we not have to wait for legislation to do?’ ”

Daley slaps one hand into the other with a sharp crack. “Let’s re-emphasize what powers we have! What we can do on our own! Push the envelope!”

Which is why the president has recently announced new plans to refinance homes, ease the debt burden of some college students and fast-track former military medics into private-sector hospital jobs.

Congress? He don’t need no stinkin’ Congress! There is an obvious downside: Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress soon will grow furious over this. But that is for the future. Obama has to address the here and now, and Congress is getting in the way of that.

“We are trying to do something in this modern presidency that has been very much engulfed by the legislative process, Democrat and Republican, over the last 40 years,” Daley says.

Instead of continuing to butt heads with Congress, the White House is going to turn its back on it when it can. (“Whether it will rise to the level of building a dam without going to Congress, that’s not realistic,” Daley says.)

All of this flows, the White House believes, from a determined effort by some in Congress, as the president recently said, to put “party ahead of country or the next election ahead of the next generation.”

“You know, when the minority leader of the Senate says my No. 1 objective in life is to make President Obama a one-term president, and then all decisions flow from that, it’s pretty hard not to be pretty cynical about that,” Daley says. “That truly was an amazing statement.”

(“The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in an interview with the National Journal in October 2010.)

There have been a number of articles in recent weeks saying Daley doesn’t really understand the workings of Congress. But Daley was Bill Clinton’s NAFTA czar in 1993, successfully lining up the votes to pass a very difficult bill for Democrats to swallow. And for years afterward, Daley kept a well-thumbed eight-page list with the names of the members of Congress who voted for the bill. What’s more, he told me years ago, “When they call and ask Rich (Richard M. Daley, Chicago’s mayor from April 1989 to May 2011) to come out for a fundraiser, I pull out this list and see if they voted with us on NAFTA.”

True, 1993 was a long time ago, but the four highest-ranking members of Congress — House Speaker John Boehner, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and McConnell — were in Congress at the time Daley was on the Hill twisting arms.

Daley’s predecessor as chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel, who became Richard M. Daley’s successor as mayor of Chicago. And some of the articles critical of Bill Daley have said Emanuel was far more adept as chief of staff. This is an accusation likely to rankle Daley, considering he kick-started Emanuel’s career by hiring him for his brother’s first successful mayor’s race.